6 Outdoor Activities that Have SAVED ME During Quarantine!

My younger two children are practically super-glued to my hip. Quarantine outdoor activities are the only thing saving my sanity. Between working from home and teaching three elementary school kids I’m spent.

This quarantine is tougher than I could have ever imagined.

I never wanted to be a stay-at-home mom… And I don’t want to start now.

Let me preface this by saying, I KNOW there are people who have it way worse than I do. There are people who are sick, or who lost their jobs… But I am at my wit’s end.

Now the school has been closed through the end of the year. That means I am holed up in my house, with my three children, for AT LEAST another month.

The only thing that has kept my household sane during this time… Has been quarantine outdoor activities. I’ve come to realize P.E. is the only thing I’m qualified to teach.

I have come up with some pretty creative outdoor activities that I want to share. These are activities me, my 6-year-old, my 8-year-old, and even my 13-year-old can do together:

We’ll start simple. Family bike rides. SO GOOD. We ride for miles every day. It gets us out of the house, we can race or sight-see or try out different routes.

Taking family bike rides have been great exercise and fun!

Chalk-Jump squares. Okay, this is also simple… But it has been really fun! Each of the kids draws a big square on the driveway with chalk. We divide the square into four smaller squares and color them in. Then, I call out to them different color combinations: blue, green, green, blue, orange, yellow! And they must jump through the squares in the pattern. The last one standing becomes the “caller”!

Stained glass chalk. I stole this off Facebook. Take some frog tape and create a pattern on your driveway. Then color them all sorts of different colors (hint: the bigger the shape, the longer this activity can last!) Remove the tape, and you have a really cool stained-glass looking masterpiece on your driveway.

Color designs on someone else’s driveway with chalk. We are fortunate that both sets of grandparents live very close by. So, we have taken our huge chalk supply and gone on “field trips” to their neighborhoods and drawn all over their driveways with chalk. The grandparents LOVE the messages and the kids love seeing their grandmas’ smile!

The kids loved decorating their grandparent’s driveway!

Silly scavenger hunt. I make lists for the kids to find outside… But it gives them the chance to be creative. For example: find something living, something non-living, something purple, something red, something that you can eat. The kids loved it (especially the younger two) and I was really stunned by how creative they both got!

Fence painting. I bought a TON of water-proof paint and let my kids GO AT IT painting our white backyard fence. They have made some really fun and cool segments of art! The best part is, it mostly washes off in the rain!

Anyway, being outside has SAVED me during this quarantine. I am so grateful that we live in Florida and the weather is perfect for being outdoors.

Laura likes to run. She uses it as an excuse to escape her 12, 7 and 5-year-old kids. Cameron, Audrey, and Lexi are amazing but exhausting. Fortunately, Laura’s partner in crime, Craig is pretty amazing himself. They’ve been married too many years to count and moved to Riverview when it was still cows in pastures. Laura worked for 18 years in television news, most recently as Executive Producer of Fox 13’s Good Day Tampa Bay, before taking the leap to the Hillsborough County School District where she works in Communications. Laura’s pet peeves include the use of “lol” and people who wear Crocs.

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